How to Make Dub: Delay Throws, Spring Reverb and Live Mixing

Where did dub music come from?

Dub grew out of Jamaican reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s as remixes of existing recordings: vocals removed, drums and bass pushed forward, and delay and reverb applied heavily. Engineers and producers including King Tubby, Scientist, Lee "Scratch" Perry and Errol Thompson pioneered it, and they treated the mixing console as an instrument^[1].

The usual origin story starts in 1968. Sound system operator Ruddy Redwood had a one-off dubplate of the Paragons' "On the Beach" cut at Treasure Isle, the vocal was left off by accident, and the instrumental went down so well at his dance that producers began issuing "versions" on single B-sides. By 1973, albums such as Lee Perry's Blackboard Jungle Dub, mixed with King Tubby, had turned versions into a genre^[1].

Tubby worked on a four-track MCI console he bought used in 1972 and kept long after others had moved to eight and sixteen tracks^[2]. The limits of that desk are a useful lesson: dub is about what you take away and how you move the faders, not about track count.

How do you build a dub riddim?

A riddim is the stripped-down drum and bass backing track, and in dub it is the song^[1]. Build it from a reggae drum pattern, a deep melodic bassline and a few offbeat instruments, then leave plenty of room for effects.

Pick the drum pattern first. In the one drop, beat 1 is left empty and the kick and cross-stick snare land together on beat 3; rockers adds a kick on every quarter note and steppers a kick on every eighth^[3]. A tempo between about 65 and 80 BPM is a comfortable starting point for one drop; steppers often feels right a little faster.

• Bass The lead instrument. Write a two- or four-bar melodic line with rests, keep it round (low-pass around 400-800 Hz) and mono.
• Skank Guitar or piano chops on the offbeats (the "and" of each beat), short and dry at the source. These become your best delay throws.
• Organ bubble An organ pattern on the eighth-note offbeats fills the middle without crowding the bass.
• Percussion Hi-hat, shaker or a single tom hit. Sparse parts give the echoes somewhere to land.
• Melodica or horn Short melodic phrases to drop in and out. Augustus Pablo brought the melodica to dub^[1].

How do you set up a DAW for dub mixing?

Set up a dub mix like a small console: every instrument on its own channel, a tape-style delay and a spring reverb on return tracks, and every channel able to reach both through sends. The effects stay 100% wet on the returns, and you "play" the send knobs and mutes.

1. Bounce the riddim to stems
   Drums (or kick, snare, hats separately), bass, skank, organ, lead and any vocal. Keep it close to Tubby's scale: 6-12 channels is plenty.
2. Create two returns
   Return A: tape delay, synced, 100% wet. Return B: spring reverb, 100% wet. Add a high-pass filter before each so the bass never feeds them.
3. Map controls
   Map mutes, send levels and a filter cutoff to a MIDI controller so you can move several at once. Mouse-only dub works, but hands on faders are faster.
4. Set a safe master
   Put a limiter on the master with a few dB of headroom, because delay feedback can build up quickly.
5. Arm automation recording
   Record every mute, send and filter move as automation while the track plays, the way an engineer would ride a desk in real time.

If sends and returns are new to you, how to use send effects on a bus covers the routing in each major DAW.

How does mute and drop mixing work in dub?

Mute and drop mixing means pulling instruments out of the riddim and bringing them back in, so that the gaps and returns create the arrangement. Dub versions typically let instruments and vocals drop in and out of the mix, and the partial removal of parts puts the spotlight on the bass^[1].

Producer Bunny Lee described Ruddy Redwood doing it live from the start: running the riddim, then bringing a little of the voice in and dropping it out again^[1]. That is still the core move.

• Drum and bass only Mute everything except drums and bass for 4 or 8 bars. It is the simplest and heaviest dub section.
• Bass drop Cut the bass for one bar before a new section and bring it back on the downbeat.
• Vocal snippets Unmute the vocal for a single word or line, then mute it and send the last syllable into the delay.
• Instrument solos Leave only the skank or organ running with heavy reverb, then slam the drums back in.
• Full stop Mute everything except the delay return for a beat or two and let the echoes carry the groove.

Work in 4- and 8-bar blocks and change only one or two things at a time. Dub sounds deliberate when each move is heard clearly.

How do you do dub delay throws with tape echo?

A delay throw is a short burst of send to the echo: you open the send for one snare hit, one skank chop or one word, close it, and let the repeats trail off on their own. The Roland Space Echo was widely used by dub producers in the 1970s^[1]; Roland introduced the RE-201 in 1974 with a record head, three playback heads, a variable-speed motor, built-in spring reverb and the ability to feed repeats back into the record head^[4].

Tape character matters because repeats degrade as they go: transport wobble adds modulation and saturation dulls each echo so it sits behind the dry sound^[4]. In software, Ableton's Echo has a Wobble control that simulates tape delay modulation, a Noise option, Repitch for pitch sweeps when you change the time, and a reverb that can sit inside the feedback loop^[5].

Making throws sound like a record

Filter the delay return: high-pass at 200-400 Hz and low-pass at 3-5 kHz so the repeats get darker and thinner than the source. Ride the feedback past 90% for a bar to build a self-oscillating swell, then pull it back before it runs away. Change the delay time while repeats are ringing to get the classic pitch dive. For the vocal side of this technique, see delay throws for hooks.

Why does dub use spring reverb?

Dub uses spring reverb because it gives a metallic, boingy splash that sits clearly around drums and chops instead of washing everything out. In a spring tank, a transducer turns the audio into vibrations that travel along the springs, reflect back and forth and decay, and a second transducer at the far end turns them back into sound^[6]. The RE-201 combined its tape echo with exactly this kind of spring^[4].

Use it sparingly and on sends. Throw a single snare or a skank chord into the spring at a high send level for the splash, then bring the send back to zero. Keep the decay around 2-3 seconds, high-pass the return at 300-500 Hz, and consider routing the spring into the delay or the delay into the spring for layered tails.

How do you perform a dub mix with filters?

Perform filter sweeps by riding a high-pass filter on a single channel or the whole mix, thinning an instrument until it is almost unrecognizable and then opening it again. King Tubby's console had a large red dial labeled "Hi Pass Filter" that he called "the Big Knob," and he used it to narrow parts until their melodic content was barely recognizable^[2].

A simple way to do it: put a 12 dB/oct high-pass filter on the drum or skank channel, map its cutoff to a knob, and sweep from 20 Hz up to 1-3 kHz over a bar or two before snapping back down on the next downbeat. Doing it on the master while the delay return stays unfiltered makes the echoes suddenly dominate.

1. Warm up
   Loop the riddim and rehearse moves for a few minutes before recording anything.
2. Record full passes
   Record three or four complete takes of the mix as automation, each with a slightly different plan.
3. Comp the best moments
   Keep the strongest sections from each take and join them at 4- or 8-bar boundaries.
4. Tidy the tails
   Check that no delay feedback runs away and that echoes cut off cleanly where you want silence.
5. Print the result
   Bounce the final mix. The pioneers played the desk like an instrument, so small imperfections are part of the sound.

These techniques carry straight into electronic music. For the four-to-the-floor version of the same ideas, read how to make dub techno, and for a software tape echo aimed at this sound, see the TAL-Dub-X review.